Games Traitors Play

‘I’m sure you were,’ said Marchant. He looked again at Meena, wondering whether he could confide in her, open up, reveal what he had seen in the mountains. But he knew he couldn’t. Despite the unexpected entente, they were working to different agendas.

‘What made you choose the Agency anyway?’ Marchant asked. ‘You don’t strike me as –’

‘– the right colour?’ She laughed.

‘Christ no, I wasn’t going to say that.’

‘The right sex?’ She laughed again, and then they both paused, her words hanging between them. Marchant thought he saw a sadness in her eyes, or maybe he was confused by his own nostalgia.

‘My father wanted me to train as a doctor. Failing that, he wanted me to marry one. I was studying medicine at Georgetown University, but then, after 9/11, everything changed.’

‘Did you lose someone?’

‘Not directly. Friends of friends, you know.’

‘But it felt personal.’

‘Yeah. And the CIA had always been a part of my life.’

‘Really?’

‘We grew up in Reston, Virginia, not far from Langley. My father used to talk so proudly of the Agency, said it was there to protect all Americans, including ones who had come from India. To prove it, we drove up there one day to take a look, when I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. There’s a public sign on the main highway, next right for the George Bush Center for Intelligence. So we took the exit and drove up through the woods, Mom and Dad in the front, my younger brother and me in the back. We were nearly shot by the guards. I think they thought we were a family of suicide bombers.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Waved their machine-guns at us and shouted at us to leave. I thought they were going to shoot the tyres out.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was mortified. He couldn’t understand why we hadn’t been welcomed with open arms. He’d been naïve to go there, but I hated seeing him so upset.’

‘And that’s why you joined?’

‘One reason. I wanted to prove to him – to me – that we’re welcome in America. That the Agency is there to defend my family as much as anyone else’s. When the Towers came down, they were suddenly looking to recruit from the subcontinent.’

‘Why did it take you so long to sign up?’

‘It took a new President.’

‘And is it everything you hoped?’

‘I’m seeing the world.’

‘But not changing it.’

‘I’m not sure tailing a renegade British agent on compassionate leave through the streets of Marrakech is quite what I had in mind.’

‘You weren’t very committed.’ Marchant matched her smile, thinking back to the first time he had seen her, watching her from across Djemaâ el Fna before giving her the runaround.

‘OK, so you lost me a couple of times in the medina. I salute your superior British tradecraft. But come on, Daniel’ – she was leaning forward now, voice lowered – ‘you didn’t really think Dhar would show up in this place, did you? Maybe I missed him. Maybe he was that guy selling dentures in the main square, the one being photographed day and night by thousands of American tourists.’

‘No, that wasn’t him.’

Marchant thought back to the halaka. Again he wanted to confide in Meena, ask her opinion, but he knew he was drunk. He hadn’t discussed Salim Dhar with anyone since he had arrived in Marrakech. The text he had received on the Thames had haunted him for the first few weeks. He had checked his phone repeatedly, in case Dhar made contact again, but he never had.

Marchant had begged Fielding to let him go to Morocco, but the Americans had insisted he stay in London. After a year of frustration and too much alcohol, he had finally arrived in Marrakech, expecting the trail to have gone cold. But as he settled into his sober new life, working the souks, listening to the storytellers, he had begun to pick up chatter here and there that gave him hope he was still on the right track.

‘Did you listen to any of those guys, the halakas?’ Meena asked.

‘One or two.’ Meena’s interest in the storyteller triggered a distant alarm, like a police siren a few streets away.

‘Terrific tales, although some of the Berber street talk threw me.’

The alarm faded. Marchant was impressed by Meena’s local knowledge. He hadn’t given her enough credit, and chided himself for judging her too swiftly. Again, he wondered whether she had been a missed opportunity, someone he should have nurtured rather than avoided. But he knew why he had kept his distance.

‘Where next for you, then? When I’m gone?’ he asked.

Meena paused. Marchant thought that she too seemed to be weighing up how much to confide, thrown perhaps by how well they were getting on. Up until now, she had hidden behind her words, preferring to spar rather than open up. She sat back, glancing half-heartedly around the bar.

‘I want out, if I’m honest. I thought I’d joined a different Agency, a new one working for a new President.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘No. I haven’t.’

‘Spiro?’

She paused again. ‘For the record, he wanted me to make your life here not worth living.’

‘But you chose not to.’

‘What did you do to him?’

‘We go back a bit. He thought my father was a traitor. Then he accused me.’

Meena stood up with his empty glass, ready to head to the bar. ‘Must have been that terrorist brother of yours.’

The remark annoyed Marchant, cut through the fog of Scotch. It was a reminder of their differences, confirmation that a junior CIA officer had seen his file. He had hoped that his kinship would remain known only to a few people in Langley and Legoland, but he realised that was wishful thinking. Meena would have been fully briefed before arriving in Morocco, given the full, shocking picture.

He thought again about the text. Let’s make good for we are brothers. The lyrics were by an Arabic singer, Natacha Atlas. Had Dhar known that she was one of Leila’s favourite artists? Marchant was getting sentimental. He couldn’t afford to dwell on Leila, not in his present state. And he couldn’t afford to talk any more with Meena.

By the time she returned to the table with another Scotch, Marchant had gone.

13 (#ulink_6feab801-709e-536a-a762-1439a8a6f7b1)

Paul Myers wouldn’t have bothered to listen to the audio one more time if it hadn’t been for Daniel Marchant. He knew his old friend had spent the past three months in Marrakech largely because of him. His line manager at GCHQ had dismissed the theory that Dhar had texted Marchant from Morocco, but Myers had thought otherwise. Like Marchant, he didn’t believe Dhar would hang around the Af-Pak region after the assassination attempt. It was too obvious, despite the mountainous terrain and the volatile political climate, both of which made it difficult for the West to search. He could never prove that Marchant’s text had been sent by Dhar, but he had run his own checks on some dodgy proxy networks, and would gladly bet his (unused) gym membership that it had originated in Morocco. And if it was a coincidence that the lyric in the text was by a singer who shared her surname with a North African mountain range, he found it a reassuring one.

So it was guilt more than anything that made him put his headphones back on, adjust the fluorescent band at the base of his ponytail and play the US audio file again. He owed it to Marchant to prove that the Americans were wrong about Dhar. He sat back and yawned, scratching at his slack stomach through his fleece jacket as he looked around the empty office.